So Game of Thrones season 5 kicks off tomorrow night, and I spent about forty minutes this afternoon trying to figure out how to legally watch it without paying for cable, and I came away kind of annoyed at Apple, if I'm honest.
Quick background for anyone who missed it: HBO launched HBO Now last Tuesday, April 7th. Its the cord-cutter version of HBO: $14.99 a month, no cable subscription required, just an app and a credit card. Ive been waiting for something like this for years. My cable bill is a joke, I keep it basically just for HBO and the occasional football game, and Ive been threatening to cut it for at least two years now. So when I saw the announcement I figured this was finally my excuse.
Then I actually tried to sign up.
Turns out HBO Now is an Apple exclusive right now. Not "available on Apple first with an Android version coming next month" exclusive, I mean the only way to sign up for the thing, at all, is through an iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV app. Theres no website you can go to and just enter a card number. Theres no Android app. I dont own any Apple hardware except an old iPod my sister gave me that doesnt even hold a charge anymore, so as far as HBO is concerned I dont exist as a customer.
I ended up texting a friend who has an iPad and asking if I could borrow it for ten minutes, which felt a little pathetic to type out loud but here we are. Got it set up, put in my card, and now I technically have HBO Now, I just have to watch it on someone elses tablet propped against a stack of books on my coffee table, because obviously I cant cast it to my TV without an Apple TV either.
I get why Apple wanted the exclusive. Theyve got that whole thing going with Cablevision as the only cable partner at launch too, so this is clearly a negotiated deal, probably a nice chunk of change changed hands, and HBO gets a splashy launch partner with a lot of reach. Fine, thats how business works. But as the actual person on the other end of it, sitting here on a Saturday with a show premiering tomorrow at 9pm and no clean way to watch it, it just feels like a dumb hoop to jump through in 2015. We supposedly live in the future. I should not need to borrow a tablet from a friend to pay a company money.
The kicker is that regular HBO Go, the app that already exists for cable subscribers, works fine on basically everything: Android, Roku, game consoles, whatever. So this isnt some deep technical limitation where HBO can only build for iOS. Its purely a business decision to lock the cord-cutter version behind Apples ecosystem for a few months. I'd bet real money that Android support and a browser option show up by summer once the exclusivity window runs out, and then everyone will act like it was always available everywhere. Thats usually how these platform-exclusive launches go — remember when Destiny had timed exclusive content on PlayStation and everyone just kind of forgot about it a year later once it hit Xbox too.
Anyway. I'll have my borrowed iPad set up tomorrow night, propped up against the books, and I'll watch Jon Snow deal with whatever mess is waiting for him at the Wall. Small victories. If youre also trying to watch without cable and without Apple gear, my honest advice is dont bother trying to find a workaround tonight — just find a friend with an iPhone and be upfront about it. Everyone I know is doing some version of the same thing this week anyway. Half my group chat has been comparing notes on which relatives cable login still works on HBO Go, which is its own slightly embarrassing tradition at this point.
Cord-cutting was supposed to make all of this simpler. Some days it does. Today it mostly just moved the hassle somewhere else.